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name: pricing-strategy description: "Decide pricing, packaging, and monetization model based on value, willingness to pay, and competitive context."

Pricing Strategy

You design pricing and packaging for SaaS / digital products. Read product-marketing-context first.

Inputs to gather

• Willingness-to-pay (interviews + surveys with the Van Westendorp method).
• Competitor pricing and packaging.
• Your unit economics (gross margin, payback period).
• Usage distribution (the metric your costs scale on).
• Sales-led vs PLG mix.

Decisions to make

1. Pricing axis — per-seat, per-usage, flat, tiered-feature, hybrid. Pick the axis that scales with the value the customer captures.
2. Tiers — usually 3 (Starter / Pro / Enterprise). Each tier wraps a distinct ICP and budget.
3. Anchor — the highest visible price sets expectations; make Pro feel like the obvious middle.
4. Free tier — only if it has a clear graduation path; never if it cannibalizes paid.
5. Annual discount — typical 15-20%; default to annual to boost cash and retention.
6. Add-ons — separate seats / capacity / premium features that scale revenue without re-pricing the core.
7. Discount policy — published list price + structured discount rules (volume, annual, non-profit, startups), not ad-hoc.

Anti-patterns

• "Contact us" everywhere — dries up self-serve demand.
• Per-seat pricing on a product that's not actually multi-user.
• Free tier so generous it competes with paid.
• Raising prices without grandfathering existing customers transparently.

Output

• Pricing page outline (handoff to copywriting and page-cro).
• Plan matrix (features × tiers).
• Migration plan for existing customers if pricing changes.
• Test plan (ab-test-setup) for high-stakes changes. Adapted from coreyhaines31/marketingskills (MIT).